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How Webinars are Reshaping Continuing Education

Best Practices

According to a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, 92 million adults in the United States are enrolled in some type of educational program and nearly two-thirds of them are taking a work-related course.  As so many things are in today’s society, many of these courses are available online, which means attending lessons and meeting the demands of your career without leaving the comfort of your home.

And that is a good thing — continuing education is a requirement and a necessity for professional development as well as to remain at the top of the field.

As an Early Learning Multimedia Manager for the Southwestern Child Development Commission Inc., I’m tasked with facilitating high-quality learning experiences in a variety of formats to the men and women who aspire to teach and renew credits. Thanks to webinars, the majority of our courses alleviate the need to be in a specific place at a set time and date.

Utilization of webinars in our continuing education program has removed many of the traditional barriers seen in the past, such as challenging work schedules, traffic and difficulty traveling, family obligations and other commitments. Webinars also may be more economical for some learners because they do not incur any travel, meal, babysitting or other expenses on the day of the class. They also help us offset the travel costs for our instructors, such as mileage and any overnight accommodations, if necessary, as well as providing copies and other materials used during face-to-face learning events.

We strive to keep our webinars engaging for our customers as we would a face-to-face event through a variety of different activities embedded into the event and utilization of adult learning techniques.  We strongly believe customers should be active participants in the learning process. We aim to create events that fully engage all types of learning styles through the use of audio, visual, kinesthetic, and social interactions.

For distance learning, we follow a particular process. Each distance learning event is peer-reviewed and offers continuing education credit.  We complete a series of forms and each has a syllabus and outline that is kept on file.  We also document the relevance of each topic for the field through a needs assessment — this is based on request — survey results, end of course evaluations, or through local/state/federal requirements.  All of our learning events are designed to meet best practices, impart practical, useful knowledge which can be applied immediately.

If your organization uses webinars for continuing education, or even internal training, it helps to follow a proven formula. To that end, here is a brief checklist to keep in mind when establishing and maintaining a continuing education curriculum:

  • Specify an overarching goal for your lessons (e.g., earned credits or certificates) and break down what professionals will need to know to earn that goal
  • Draft each of your lessons
  • Send your lessons for peer-review (this can be a peer or superior from your company or a consultant)
  • Refine based on feedback and publish your series
  • Within your series, incorporate polls and surveys on topic relevancy
  • Include an end-of-course evaluation
  • Assess feedback and incorporate for your next course iteration

The post How Webinars are Reshaping Continuing Education appeared first on ON24 .

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CMO Confessions Ep. 7, Sam MeInick

Allocadia

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of CMO Confessions. It’s been a busy few weeks, but we have a double-whammy for you to tune into to make up for it.

First, we have Sam Melnick, VP of marketing at Allocadia. Sam is a seasoned marketing pro who approaches his field with an eye on statistics, a la sabermetrics, and a deep understanding of how to measure ROI. Sam’s insights into how marketers measure success are remarkable — not the least of which is because we both hail from Boston.

You can find Sam and his latest insights on his Twitter feed, @SamMelnick .

Finally, if you’re interested in listening to our growing podcast series, you can find all of our episodes right here in podbean. Alternatively, you can also find us on both iTunes and Google Play stores.

Later this week, we’ll have Sara Gonzalez of Simple on to discuss how she approaches marketing in Australia and APAC in general. It’s another great episode and I highly recommend you tune in.

Without further ado, welcome to CMO Confessions. Let’s chat.

Transcript:

Joe Hyland:

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of CMO confessions, a weekly B2B sales and marketing podcast that explores what it really means to be a marketing leader in today’s business world. I’m Joe Hyland, CMO here at ON24, and this week I am psyched to have a fellow Bostonian, Sam Melnick, VP of marketing at Allocadia, on. Sam, how’s it going?

Sam Melnick:

I’m doing well. Thanks for having me. It’s always great to reconnect with the East Coast. Allocadia is a West Coast company, we’re based out of Vancouver, and I’ve got a Slack channel that’s called East Coast, Beast Coast. So, you’d be a member if you if you’re ever on our Slack channel, all right?

Joe Hyland:

I like it, thank you. Yeah, no people. Some friends of mine, rightly so, give me shit that the only Boston thing about me now is my six-one-seven area code and otherwise I’ve converted so. But at heart, I’m still a Boston dude.

Sam Melnick:

Well, there you go. As long as you got the six-one-seven will keep you.

Joe Hyland:

I will literally have that for the rest of my life until Verizon forces a regional area code.

Well, listen, I’m as I said, I’m psyched and thankful that you’re taking the time to be with me and our audience today. You’ve got some cool experience. I love you’ve been doing this stuff for well over a decade. I’d love to get your take on how you got to where you are today because I think — and I’ll start there — because I think it’s interesting that there’s not a one-size-fits-all path or approach to leading marketing and I think your approach and your path is actually pretty cool. So, you want to give us a couple minutes on that?

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, sure, absolutely. I wouldn’t quite call myself an accidental head of marketing, but I certainly didn’t start off my career being like, “I’m gonna be a VP of marketing or CMO.” I actually went to school, at UMass Amherst for sport management and I was supposed to be the next Theo Epstein. I actually started my career off running a small baseball team and working for a sport marketing agency.

I eventually found my way into tech, where I worked in marketing at a start-up — a 30-person start up in Boston. But then I pivoted over to an analyst role at IDC in a group called the CMO advisory service. So, we worked with large marketing organizations or large companies at large tech companies. So, like IBM, Dell, Cisco — all those types of companies were customers of ours. And we covered the marketing operation space and worked with CMOs on how they design their organization and where they spend their dollars and their resources.

And that was, you know, — analyst was an amazing experience because you get to talk with all of these people who have so much more experience than you and different experiences — I’ve seen so much scale — but you get to learn from 20, 30, 40 people on how they’re taking on marketing. And that kind of that’s slung-shot me into the MarTech space, because I started hearing about all these cool Technologies — you know, the ON24s the allocate of the world and I started creating a list of different interesting MarTech SaaS companies because I saw this growing. Like, I would, tweet back and forth with Scott Brinker before anyone knows who Scott Brinker was. Like, I saw this Market growing and I knew I wanted to be a part of it. I was a believer that SaaS technologies were going to be the differentiator and so I ended up at lattice engines and a customer-facing world.

So, Lattice is a predictive marketing organization — it’s customer-facing which, again, was amazing to learn from all these great marketers. But I missed marketing. I was kind of moonlighting as a product marketer and an analyst. I had written some content. I was doing sales enablement. I was kind of doing like a bunch of marketing stuff.

So, I decided I want to get back into marketing. Went to Allocadia. I got this opportunity to we called IT Director of Customer Marketing Insights. So, it was kind of part marketer, part analyst, part customer-facing kind of SME, subject matter expert.

Joe Hyland:

That’s cool. That’s a nice bridge, too.

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, and then they I guess I did a good enough job and they offered me an opportunity to run the marketing team, and I said, “Yeah, let’s try that out.” And now I’ve been in that role for almost 18 months now and it’s been a lot of fun building out a team and learning something new here as well.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, you’ve given up the dream of running a baseball team one day or is that maybe act two after the B2B marketing world?

Sam Melnick:

Maybe act two. You know, the baseball team stuff was fun, but, I mean, I don’t know — as weird as it sounds the tech industry and marketing is almost as interesting to me now. I guess I’m a full-fledged marketing nerd.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, you got to be a geek to love this stuff. Well, I think it’s interesting that — and we’ll talk about that — because maybe you don’t have to be a geek to love this stuff.

I think there’s an interesting comparison and, perhaps it’s somewhat analogous, on what’s happened in — and I say past tense, but it’s still happening in in baseball and other sports — with the Money Ball movement and really looking at the right metrics. And I think for literally decades or upwards of a century the wrong analytics was being applied to the wrong areas, or   the wrong metrics.

I think that’s happened in the B2B marketing space. And I think the Geeks are coming and, maybe, the Geeks are here. But what kind of points of comparison did you see from your time on the baseball side to what’s happening in marketing with attribution and analytics and kind of you name it?

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, no, I think it’s a really good comparison. I think it started off in a niche, to a certain extent. And not just B2B Tech, in particular, but in general, in B2B, you saw that early days, with the adopters of the Eloquas or the Marketos, they knew they needed to automate, they need knew they needed in different sorts of data. That’s when you really saw these in-depth funnel and funnel metrics and then it’s just grown. I mean, there’s been an industry that’s been almost built around, you know, Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua — to a lesser extent, the Pardots of the world and it’s created this opportunity for a bunch of cool companies. But, more importantly, technologies that help marketers’ jobs better and serve their customers better and get the data to answer those questions.

Joe Hyland:

I think it’s interesting — one, I mean a lot of these metrics, I’ll pick on MQLs for a moment, a lot of these metrics are pretty easy to manipulate, right? Like, I think, for the longest time, marketers have been measured on something that doesn’t necessarily correlate to the end goal that you should have in mind, at least if it’s a Demand Gen use-case. An MQL would be a good example of that, right? If your marketing team is solely incented upon MQLs, there are pretty easy ways to artificially jack up the number of MQLs coming in the door. And I think that’s a little bit of a poor man’s approach to having true marketing attribution driven approach.

I’d love to hear your perspective on companies focusing on the wrong thing because I think the waterfall metrics and some of the companies you just referenced helped move the ball forward, but I also think it allowed people to focus on some of the wrong areas.

Sam Melnick:

For sure, and I think it’s you know, you asked about the comparison against sabermetrics, and I think in a similar sense you saw better Baseball analytic metrics come out, but they still weren’t like…

Joe Hyland:

Let’s geek out, like you go there…

Sam Melnick:

You want me to geek out? Okay, OPS, for baseball, was a very, basically, it’s on-base percentage, plus batting average, plus slugging percentage was one of the earlier days, kind of sabermetrics, but it really didn’t answer all the questions. And then later you started seeing stuff like wins above replacement come out. Which was more all-inclusive of how strong was that player. Whereas, in B2B marketing, you start with an MQL. An MQL is a hell of a lot better than how many website visitors ya get or, even worse — how many advertisements or how many PR press releases we want out — but it still isn’t closing that loop which, is more pipeline, revenue. That’s a I think that’s a pretty great comparison there — progress but not perfection.

Joe Hyland:

Do you think do you think the war for B2B marketing is pipeline? I mean, what is the wins above replacement metric for us?

Sam Melnick:

I think that’s a tough one because people want to focus in on revenue and pipeline and you have to be there. I’d say that’s the table stakes at this point — being able to measure at the very least pipeline and B2B marketing and marketing’s contribution and influence to that — it’s table stakes. But to say that’s the end-all be-all kinda of sells ourselves, as marketers, short. Because there’s so much more that goes into marketing and, unfortunately, you can’t tie a one-to-one comparison against it. Sometimes it’s because sales reps do a mediocre — I’m being kind — job of filling out contact roles in Salesforce and other times it’s a brand campaign that you’re not able to tie directly. So…

Joe Hyland:

Yeah

Sam Melnick:

…it’s a tough question to say, what is the war for B2B marketing, but it’s not pipeline and revenue.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that’s interesting. I think you raise an incredibly valid point is — I’m trying to think of a good sports analogy since around the baseball topic and one is not coming to mind — it is incredibly important metric. But, I think, an area of the business and, for us, we’re laser-focused on growth, so if my CEO, who has an office right next to me, were sitting in the room he probably would correct this statement — but yeah, it’s not just pipeline. Should marketing own customer experience? It’s very, we just we had a team meeting this morning and we were presenting out results for the quarter, and a major effort is underway to increase our brand and improve our brand. And there are ways to measure that, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of them are more qualitative, right?

So, there are important components outside of demand gen, for sure, what we did here and — for what it’s worth — is, when I got here — so I’ve been here for three years — there was a whole bunch of bullshit on marketing pointing at sales. Like, they’re not following up in the leads or not properly same thing back to marketing like, it’s not high enough quality. There were lots of excuses on both sides. And so, the head of sales and I got together, and I said, “How about I, slash marketing, we just own all just, so it will get the garbage out.” I don’t care where it’s coming from — we obviously care in terms of optimizing spend very much — but, you know, I’ll present it in the board and that way we’re aligned. I don’t know maybe that’s stupid of me, but that that’s how we do it here.

Sam Melnick:

No, I mean, we’ve had a couple of sales leaders through my time across different companies, for sure. And, right now, we’ve got probably the strongest sales and marketing alignment that I’ve seen, and it makes a difference. Because you’re focusing. We did a presentation at SiriusDecisions Summit with box and their mark one of their marketing operations leads. And what he said — Tim West is name — and what he said was for them, it was about — instead of arguing over the pieces of the pie — it was about growing the pie. And that’s where we want to get to with sales. How do you grow it? And give them credit?  Like, fine, it’s your credit, but as long as it’s growing, we’re all good, you know? Growing at the right rate.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, all boats can rise. That was the situation when I got here — we weren’t where we needed to be and instead of the discussion focused on how to solve that, I had my head of demand gen fighting with our North America head of sales on who should get credit for a deal that just came in. And it was like, “Who gives a shit? We’re not where we need to be — isn’t that the bigger challenge?” Okay, what you want to dive into —I think it’s great, there’s nothing more important than making sure we’re measuring the right things — but I would say, maybe two or three steps before that, is putting in place the proper foundation and in-fact having a rock-solid planning process. How do you how do you view that world? And how to you how do you either keep yourself or help keep other marketers out of the world of just having a whole bunch of tactics listed and they say, “Well there’s my strategy, I’m good, right?”

Sam Melnick:

I think it’s important because like they actually feed into each other. We’ve been talking at Allocadia a lot about planning. Part of it is where our product helps marketers, but it’s also that it’s that time of the year for large B2B companies — if you’re on a fiscal year calendar — you’re just coming into planning season. Because, typically, those multi-million, certainly billion-dollar companies they start their strategic planning and setting those plans in place six months in advance. And 60 to 70 percent of companies are on a fiscal year calendar or calendar fiscal.

And how I like to say it, and how we’re saying it, is, “It all starts with the plan.” You know? Your metrics starts with the plan because you’re setting up your data, you’re setting up what you’re going to achieve, you’re setting up how you’re going to measure it. If you just say, “All right, if we execute, execute, execute.” And say alright, “We want to measure these things.”

There’s no guarantee that your data has been set up correctly. There’s no guarantee that you’ve been putting your resources and efforts and your plan towards it. So, everything from metrics to data to certainly strategy and where you’re putting your activities, it starts with the plan and getting that down wherever it is and getting it bought in and online up, down, across.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you anymore. I’m curious to know your thoughts on the — I haven’t heard this said this way — but the death of the brief. Are you seeing companies being as diligent in their planning process and ensuring that they’re doing proper campaign briefs at the start? And then, on the on the other side, actually going through and having a post mortem.

Sam Melnick:

No, I mean, have you ever seen companies be really diligent on that? Do you have examples of that? They all say they do.

Joe Hyland:

I know, that’s right — I feel like in this world, where so much of marketing is coming down to pipeline and results — I’m seeing a we got to get shit done mindset, which is great. But to quote-unquote “get shit done,” they’re just cutting out the planning process. So, is that really a good idea? Yeah, no — it’s a problem.

Sam Melnick:

I agree and my team — and certainly we’re not the, you know, we’re not some of these huge companies that I used to work with that IDC and all those — but, like, we’re not perfect by any means. But we have, you talked about briefed — you kind of just tweaked me — my demand gen lead has put in a great process where she actually goes through each of the programs, shows the metrics, shows what was the positive and negative — and then we as a team, at least, pull out a few of them and do kind of a verbal brief, “This is what work this is what this is what we do different.”

It’s certainly not like a formal brief — you know, in this perfect world — but we’ve been doing that for the last few quarters and it’s really helpful because it helps us optimize and adjust and that’s really what you want. It’s like, “How do I do better next time?”

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I’m a big believer that many things in life are spectrum and it’s easy to it’s easy to treat things in a binary fashion, right? Like it’s a one or a zero and so often life is lived in the in the gray not the black and white.

It’s interesting on this concept if you applied that to what it’s like for a two-person shop should they be doing a brief? Like, should they be doing a post-mortem? Do they have the luxury of doing that? Although, on the other side of the spectrum is — IBM or SAP or Microsoft, right— where literally nothing gets out the door if it doesn’t have a brief — and probably takes months and months and months.

Are there happy mediums along the way for companies of different sizes? Because when I was back East at Kronos, and we weren’t necessarily a huge company, but we had I don’t know 150, 175 people in marketing — literally nothing got out the door without going through a proper briefing process.

Our planning was rock-tight or airtight, excuse me, and we did many post-mortems after the fact. But, you’re right a multi-month brief process, I mean, that wouldn’t that wouldn’t fly here at ON24. I would be shocked if it would for you, but something’s got to be done.

Sam Melnick:

I think it does depend and I think it’s the right balance, like we. We say run it, well, we say there’s two sides of marketing: there’s running marketing and doing marking — doing is the execution and running is like the strategy and the planning behind the scenes — and there’s a certain point where you do need to put the efforts into the running of marketing. So, that’s the briefs, that’s the planning, that’s the measurement.

But the reality is that there is this kind of focus of execution and the fewer resources you have, probably the more nimble you can be and spend more of your time on the doing. Partially because of necessity and partially just because it’s easier to walk up to somebody who’s right next to you in the cube or office. Whereas, at a 150 to 200-person marketing team, you don’t want to be spending quarter million bucks, half a million dollars on a campaign without some checks and balances. And then making sure that you’ve actually put in the right, I guess, effort into the running part.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, no, you’re right. At Kronos, like at an enormous company. We were split across multiple buildings in in Chelmsford, never mind our International presence, right? So yeah, sending a slack to the dude sitting right next to you — it wasn’t that simple.

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, it’s also like you’re talking about multiple regions, product lines, and it’s like, there has to be some way — whether it’s a brief there’s technology — like that’s kind of, you know, an Allocadia or different marketing performance management software systems. Or, you know, EPM-type solutions that are coming out — I think was an Adaptive Insights that just got bought by workday?

Joe Hyland:

Yeah,1.5 billion-dollar price tag.

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, not bad. So obviously there’s some sort of interest in planning at the enterprise level. You know, there’s got to be ways to make sure an organization documents, and is making decisions, in a smart way. So, I don’t know I don’t have the perfect answer for it for sure.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, no, I don’t think there is a perfect answer — what I find what I find interesting is — I think it’s particularly worse out here in the Bay Area. So, I think five or 10 years ago, a slippery slope for marketers would be confusing tactics with strategy — or doing with running as you would say, right? So, you’d say just ask them about their marketing strategy and they would list off “Like, I’m going to this event, I’m going to this conference we’re doing this, email drop.” You name it.

And it was a whole bunch of tactics and lacked like a clear cohesive strategy. What I’m seeing now more of — and I will admit this as a technologist —is marketers just listing a whole bunch of technology. So, it’s like if one more person tells me that their strategy is account-based marketing, because they’ve turned on — you name it — DemandBase or one of the host of other ABM platforms, which is great, that’s not a strategy.

And I would say the same thing for webinars. Your strategy shouldn’t be webinars — it’s like, well, how are you planning on segmenting your database? What’s the real goal in mind? You know, what’s the best form to communicate with folks? Like how are you measuring it? I think it’s a problem for marketers.

Sam Melnick:

I totally agree. There’s someone I know in a marketing team and they said, “We’re gonna buy XYZ technology that’s ABM — it’s gonna change the way our business runs.” No, that’s not — I mean, it could help — but the technology… And you know, again, we’re a marketing technology company. I’ve worked for a couple of them and I’m a huge believer. I want MarTech and Technology can do for marketing organizations— but if the right foundation and thought process and kind of surround — the people, process, technology. If you can’t just do it with technology have to do it with process.

Joe Hyland:

Yes.

Sam Melnick:

…People as well.

Joe Hyland:

Yes. That’s right. And we are believers in personalization here at ON24 — which, for me, ABM is just a subset of that. But yeah, that requires a commitment. That requires a lot of content, for example. It requires a pretty sophisticated view on segmentation. Buying any technology and just assuming it will it will solve your woes — that’s a Fool’s errand, right? Like, it’s not going to go well, which is why I think you go back to having a fantastic foundation a real process and strategy in place. And then, from there, I think that you plug in the tactics and the appropriate technologies and you can be off to the Races.

But yeah, having this get-shit-done mindset with just tactics and a plug-in a whole bunch of tech solutions — I think just leads marketers to be more and more frustrated.

Sam Melnick:

Great, yeah. No, I agree.

Joe Hyland: Great. Yeah, exactly. I think we beat that that horse dead.

I actually just had a conversation with a CMO that I’m friends with down and Sydney, Sara Gonzales, at Simple.

Sam Melnick:

Okay

Joe Hyland:

I don’t know if you know Sarah and Simple, but an interesting discussion happened when I was down in Sydney. All these marketers kept asking me — we had a conference down there about a month ago, “I know we’re not as sophisticated, Down Under, and I know we’re not using technology and advanced ways,” which I found really interesting because I didn’t think it was true. I think, for the longest time, U.S. marketers have kind of assumed that APAC is very much behind the United States in terms of marketing maturity. I do that long setup because I think the same thing happens — it’s not just for marketers, it’s technology in general — with the West Coast to East Coast. Like, there’s a lot of East Coast bias with media and kind of a host of other things where the East Coast is the center of gravity. But for tech companies you would be amazed at how snobby we are.

We look at the East Coast, and in particular, Boston, as if there’s HubSpot and maybe two other tech companies. And I know you guys are, in fact, headquartered on the West Coast, but you started MarTech in The Hub, right? I’d love to get your take on what it’s like being a technologist in Boston.

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, MarTech in the Hub kind of started off the marketing, MarTech conference that Scott Brinker ran. A few of us, we get a bunch of marketing and marketing technology folks together about once a quarter. So, you know, I’ve worked for companies in the valley and it’s certainly a bigger ecosystem. But Boston, I’d say Boston has a very strong — like it’s there. Talent-wise and maturity-wise, would I put The Valley leaps and bounds ahead of Boston? Probably not. There’s just a lot more people and that kind of gets the flywheel rolling. I’d say Boston, what it has, is it’s kind of got a longer — I mean — it’s almost got a longer role for things. Like, people are not — they’re more conservative — they go back to their Puritan roots, you know? A little bit more conservative. But like really strong, community — particularly in B2B tech. Particularly, deep tech. Like, you think about like an EMC or think about what it was like 30-40 years ago. You’ve got digital equipment. You’ve got —

Joe Hyland:

You name it, like Stratus Technologies. There’s a there’s a lot a lot of good tech companies in Boston.

Sam Melnick:

And to a fault, there’s probably also a bit too much of Academia. Because you’ve got Harvard and MIT and you got, you know, Babson has Olin College down there — which is engineering only. And Boston’s a small city, you go up to the valley: you’ve got San Francisco and then you’ve got San Jose and then there’s everything in between — and it’s just a lot more spread out. Whereas in Boston it’s all in one place and everybody’s around there and it’s — yeah.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I think your comments on. I think it’s full of shit, a lot of it is — not your comments, but [laughter] you’re full of shit —

Sam Melnick:

It’s alright, you can call me out.

Joe Hyland:

I think there’s a notion that there’s more talent out here — and maybe I’m showing my six-one-seven area code bias here — I don’t know, it’s silly. When I got out here, some of my peers were like, “I don’t know any of the stuff you’re doing.” This was at Talia, my last company. “It’s really bold, it’s really loud. Like, I think, maybe, it’s too much.” And I was like, “I don’t know, I mean just where I’m from, the East Coast, we’re a little louder.” I don’t know there’s more people out here — I mean, San Francisco, people think it’s bigger than it is, there’s only six or seven hundred thousand people — San Jose three million, right? So, I mean there’s yeah there’s a lot of people in between you know.

Sam Melnick:

I think that it’s there’s a lot of people in Tech. There’s just so many — like, you drive up the one-oh-one and you’re just like, “Oh, tech company, tech company. Boston has a lot of tech, but like, there’s biotech there’s pharma there’s — I think Harvard is the largest employer in Cambridge, which is the biggest city next to Boston.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, you’re right. There’re literally thousands of tech companies. It’d be interesting — you were referencing Scott Brinkner before — MarTech 5,000, which I think is now over 6,000. I don’t know he’s not doing it anymore, right? I don’t know it’d be interesting to see how many of those companies are out here. And a lot of those companies will fail. A lot. I mean, the market isn’t large enough to support five to six thousand companies for B2B marketing. I don’t know what the right number is. Actually, that’s a good point. I’m curious to — after I shit on the area that I live in now — I’m curious to get your take as to who this “Survivors” will be — not by company name, of course. Are there certain qualities or characteristics that will determine who will survive in this kind of Darwinian ecosystem that we live in?

Sam Melnick:

Well, the two companies that come to mind that’ll survive are ON24 and Allocadia, so I’ll start there.

Joe Hyland:

Obviously, that’s tip of the pyramid.

Sam Melnick:

Actually, that’s a really good question and I’ve got this blog post that I need to write about it.  My comment is just two kinds of — when I think about particularly data in MarTech — there are two kinds of marketing SaaS companies. There are those that are creating data — basically a new data source that can be utilized whether you know different ways that you can’t elsewhere — then there’s those that are kind of manipulating data and using data from external sources, and you talked about attribution, building models or predictive, you know. And those companies are not — I don’t think — are going to ever live as stand-alone because, essentially, they’re a part of an ecosystem. They’re using data from elsewhere. They’re tying into other Technologies. But if you didn’t have those other touch-points, they don’t exist, you know?

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Sam Melnick:

So, if you have a technology that can sit on its own, create its own data — it might be much less valuable without the connections — but it still can provide value. So, that’s something that I look for in terms of that ability of what’s going to come out.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that’s a very interesting point. I’d add to it that I think — and it’s like great marketing, you need to know your audience inside and out and understand how you solve their problems and if you’re doing anything but that you’re probably missing the mark — great marketing is about finding ways to help marketers engage. I mean, it is all about engagement. And I think in this new world order that we that we live and play in, it’s about providing insights into what works and how you can be smarter, and smarter, and smarter, and smarter.

So, my sense is, and all jokes aside, companies that focus on those two areas when — let’s say something happens in the economy and dollars are squeezed — if you’re helping marketers be more engaging and you’re helping provide insights, I think you’ll stay in the market Tech stack. So, that’s my perspective. So yeah, maybe Allocadia and ON24 will be okay.

Sam Melnick:

Okay. There you go. Let’s hope so. Knock on wood, at least.

Joe Hyland:

Okay, with that, I think our half hour is up. Sam, I want to thank you so much. This was fantastic, and I will talk to everyone on our next episode of CMO confessions. Thanks so much, man.

Sam Melnick:

Awesome. Well, thanks for having me it was a blast.

The post CMO Confessions Ep. 7, Sam MeInick appeared first on ON24 .

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Understand your virtual audience through their digital body language

CMMA Blog

This post was originally published on martechtoday.com

As marketers, we’re in the business of understanding behavior and what makes people buy things. But in the age of technology, when we can communicate seamlessly with anyone, anywhere with an internet connection, crucial elements still get lost in translation.

It’s somewhat absurd that with the rise of digital, we’ve actually masked a lot of the behavioral signals that help us piece together the person behind the action.

Sure, someone clicked, but do you know why? And how should you engage them next, since customer engagement drives purchase decisions?

Your prospective customers aren’t necessarily saying anything to you verbally like you’d hear a loved one or a boss. So, we’re left to sift through click-through rates, time spent on web pages and drop-off times on videos. But, it’s vital that we decipher what our customers are trying to tell us online, just as we would in an in-person conversation.

Despite their seeming silence, customers are continually giving off signals about their mindset through their behavior during their engagement with your assets — powerful signals I like to call “digital body language.”

How Best Buy is using its insights

In recent months, for example, Best Buy realized their special sauce was the in-person conversation — the interaction people have in-store with the “blue shirts,” the employees wearing the well-known bright blue polo shirts. So Best Buy exploited this point of differentiation in its most recent ad campaign.

Recently, Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Whit Alexander said:

Telling the story of our people — and how we make a meaningful impact on customers’ lives — is at the heart of this work,”  “The core of what differentiates Best Buy vs. everyone else — and makes us awesome for customers — is that we understand your unique needs and how tech can enhance your life.

There are nuances to the process of buying electronics, especially big-ticket items, and an online description frequently doesn’t meet shoppers’ needs. That’s why Best Buy has shifted its focus to make its business model all about reading and engaging their customers.

One 30 second spot, for example, shows an employee helping a customer choose a refrigerator — a purchase decision based specifically on fingerprint-resistance.

This is a powerful lesson for B2B companies to apply to our own marketing — we need to create an environment online that mirrors the showroom experience, where we can take cues from prospective customers.

Reading buyer’s digital body language

So you’ve got all these metrics on your prospective buyers, but the difficulty lies in deciphering what their actions actually mean. Your data should provide intelligence into how to approach each customer.

Here are some general guidelines about how to interpret and act on your prospect’s online behavior:

Multiple visits to your website or content
This is the equivalent of bumping into someone a few times and making small talk. You’re not quite friends, but you are acquaintances and know a few things about each other. These buyers are aware of your product and offerings, but may not know much about them.

It’s best to engage them with introductory content, and not get too into the weeds too fast. If you have a sense of what industry they work in, you should tailor your content based on those insights. Keep these pieces of content on the short side, so you don’t lose their attention.

Above average time spent on your website or content
You’ve captured someone’s attention, for whatever reason. This is a person leaning into a conversation. While they may still be unfamiliar with your product and offerings, a person who is spending longer than average perusing your content is engaged.

These prospects are deeper into the evaluation process, and, while they may not fully understand your offerings, they’re more willing to commit to longer forms of content because they are engaged. You should market to them accordingly.

Answering your surveys or questions embedded on your web pages or in your content
These are prospects who are actively engaging with you and carrying on a conversation. They likely understand your offerings more than most, and ant specific information on how they can apply your solutions to their specific industry or role.

These people want to buy your solution, but are doing their due diligence and need that final reassurance they’re making the right decision. It’s your job as a marketer to provide information that’s tailored to taking them across the finish line, from prospect to customer.

Understanding why people are engaged

We’re all looking to try to find prospects and capture their attention. And no metric is foolproof.

Someone might have visited your content and started a video, and then left it running on another tab without paying any attention to it. Or they may have watched for a while, but spent the majority of the time rolling their eyes. That’s why it’s vital to engage with your prospects throughout — whether by conducting surveys or asking questions when they arrive on web pages through platforms that offer such functionality.

Identifying engagement involve a lot more trial and error than most marketers like to admit, and we can accept that. What we shouldn’t accept is a failure to do the analysis after the fact to understand how and why we captured a buyer’s attention. The signals are out there, even in the digital world. It’s up to us to find them, learn from them and replicate our successes for future marketing campaigns.

No matter your approach, it’s vital to respect your audience at every step of the sales process. Today’s noisy and competitive marketing landscape makes it virtually impossible to go without an outbound marketing strategy. But you must take care to avoid simply adding to the noise.

The way you’ll truly resonate with your potential customers by being in tune with their digital body language, reading their digital cues and responding accordingly, just as you would face to face.

The post Understand your virtual audience through their digital body language appeared first on ON24 .

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Summer Reading: How Webinars Help Drive Pipeline

Best Practices

For today’s marketers, generating leads is the name of the game. Make more leads, get more money. Sadly, identifying quality prospects — those sales can turn into revenue — isn’t easy. As marketers, we need to look beyond measuring the potential for pipeline and move towards measuring results for pipeline.

So, how does this work? Well, we Mark Bornstein lays it out on track three of our Summer Playlist , but we can also summarize the main points here.

Conceptually, it’s straightforward. Take a look at all of your marketing tactics and analyze conversions by percentage of market-qualified leads. Then, focus your efforts and exploit the tactics that work.

Microsoft, for example, analyzed its methods and found webinars converted leads — attendees to buyers — at a high rate (7.2 percent) . It doubled-down on its webinar efforts, going from 200 to more than 4,000 webinars per year — and netted SiruisDecisions’ 2016 ROI Award in the process.

So what are the basics of using webinars to drive pipeline?

First, webinars need to drive movement across the entire buying cycle — not just top. That means you’ll need to develop thought leadership webinars, company and product positioning webinars, case studies, validation and, of course, demonstration webinars to offer your prospects a full picture of what your organization has to offer.

Keep in mind the tone needed for each stage. Top-of-funnel events, like thought leadership webinars, should remain high-level and avoid being too “pitchy.” Similarly, bottom-of-funnel events should address specific pain points attendees are experiencing and demonstrate what your solution can accomplish for them.

The second step in getting webinars to drive pipeline is to increase the number of content touches in each webinar event. Creating these opportunities is advantageous in and of itself — it makes your webinars more interactive (by having your presenter point out where visitors can go for more information), and it gives you the opportunity to audit your content.

Still, you’ll want to make your content available in a webinar for one key reason: to let your audience members choose their own buyer’s journey experience. By enabling attendees to decide which steps they want to take, whether be it downloading content, registering for a demo, contacting a salesperson, or simply looking up the presenter’s biography, you provide your prospects with the subtle tools to indicate where they are on the buyer’s map, what stage and how likely they are to convert.

Just remember: more content means more opportunity for engagement and potentially more qualified leads.

The third step in using webinars to drive pipeline is to take a closer look at lead scoring. By examining how an attendee engages with a webinar — by asking questions, downloading content, answering polls and surveys and more — you can get a clearer understanding of where the attendee is on the buying cycle as well as the likelihood of future engagement and if they’re a good fit for a potential buyer.

Engagement scoring through webinars is a great way to break out leads across different tiers as well. For example, the most engaged leads can be matched with an account executive while the least engaged leads can be given nature material — saving your sales team time and effort. The point is, by measuring webinar engagement, you can better break out leads by quality and give them the appropriate amount of care and attention.

The final step for driving pipeline is handing off to sales. With right marketing systems in place, complete with engagement analysis, webinars can provide your sales teams with the critical contextual information they need to make a quality call with a lead. For example, if the lead asked a question during a webinar, a sales rep could provide them with additional content or offer a direct answer to their problem. They could also reference the content of the webinar to continue the conversation with a lead and, hopefully, bring in a close.

Webinars make it easy to drive pipeline. All you have to do create, provide, articulate and follow up on the content you’ve already created.

Speaking of which, we have some more material for you to peruse. It’s our Summer Reading list inspired by track three of our Summer Playlist. Take a look:

  1. Using Big Marketing Event Ideas to Drive Pipeline
  2. It’s Time for Marketing to take on Revenue Responsibility
  3. How Genesys scaled its global webinar program with ON24
  4. Lead Intelligence: A Better Model for Lead Gen
  5. How Microsoft creates world-class, ROI-driven webinar programs

The post Summer Reading: How Webinars Help Drive Pipeline appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Summer Reading: 5 Tips for generating must-see webinars

audience

The Summer Playlist series is smoldering hot and well underway . To accompany today’s best webinar tracks, we’ve put together a summer reading list for you to peruse at your pleasure.

So, go ahead and brush up on program planning basics, browse demand-gen tactics, consume some engagement-focused content. Our summer reading list is produced for your leisure.

Our first summer reading list, based on today’s event, “Creating Must-See Webinars: How to Attract, Engage and Retain your Audience, ” covers, well, how to attract, engage and retain audience members.

It’s not as easy as it sounds! As Jeremy Collins, BrightEdge’s Director of Digital Marketing can attest, building and maintaining an audience is a full-time job. But there are a few tricks and tips to you can deploy for great effect.

Build out your personas

It’s no secret personas are critical marketing tools, but using them as a master resource for a webinar program is essential. Design events and programs catering to the needs of your profiles for a structured approach to your events. But don’t forget to do your persona research as well.

Promote where your audience is

Some audiences prefer different digital locales — whether that’s social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn or forums like Reddit or SpiceWorks. Research where your personas go — even if it’s only as far as Google and cater your event’s titles, SEO and ads to appeal to that environment.

Get buy-in from your experts

Check in with your resident experts — whether they’re on product, sales or your executive teams — to get their feedback on your program and buy-in. The more you help your audience with your experts, the more your trust you brand builds — and repeat viewers.

Email isn’t dead

Good email is never dead, but bad email always is. One the best sources for pulling in webinar attendees is in the inbox — so long as you cater your message to match the recipient’s persona. When you announce an event relevant to a well-defined persona, audiences respond.

Play the long game

On-demand webinars are in demand. One of BrightEdge’s key tactics is to use on-demand webinars to continue generating leads long after a live event is over. In fact, Steve Winchester, CMO of Rego Consulting, found his team’s live and on-demand webinars perform on near-peer levels — roughly 1,500 live attendees to 1,200 on-demand attendees.

Right. So you have your webinar tips and your Summer Playlist track. Now, it’s time for the reading list. Take a gander at your first webinar reading assignment for the summer:

  1. How to Build a Killer Webinar Presentation
  2. See How Twilio Boosts Webinar Attendance with Facebook and an On-Demand Strategy
  3. How to improve audience participation in your webinar
  4. 3 Things Your Audience Wants from Your Webinar

The post Summer Reading: 5 Tips for generating must-see webinars appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Gearing Your Marketing for a GDPR Future

Best Practices

For the past few weeks, we’ve published a few items on the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. The law, which took effect on May 25 of this year, is comprehensive and impacts marketers around the globe . If you interact with data stemming from a citizen of the European Union, your organization will need to accommodate it.

Acquiescing to the new standards of marketing, however, isn’t easy. Databases need to be cleansed. Marketing tactics need to be updated. Real human engagement, especially in a digital environment, needs to take priority. Webinars, as we discussed earlier , provide a GDPR-compliant foundation for organizations to build engaging campaigns on. Still, companies need to know how to craft campaigns and webinars so they fall in line with GDPR.

A GDPR-ready program has a fundamental grasp of the law and how it applies specifically to the program and its parent organization. With this knowledge in mind, marketers can make the necessary back-end adjustments to extract the most from its digital events and maintain compliance for the long run.

Before you Webinar

To start, marketers won’t find the all-encompassing legal GDPR guidance they need in a blog post, a news article or a webinar. Officers and managers must read the actual legislation to understand how it affects them and seek the advice of their legal team or legal counsel. The goal here is for the marketing, sales and executive arms of the organization to have a unified understanding of the law, its impacts, and how the company can coordinate to come into compliance.

With this foundational knowledge underarm, organizations can then plot adjustments to their back-end practices. Doing so often involves establishing a dedicated compliance officer, executing an audit of your database as well as a database cleanse, updating email and messaging preference centers and building out standards and policies for long-term compliance. As an added benefit, these back-end updates can help an organization right its marketing data ship, expunging low-quality contacts while providing an opportunity to adjust scoring models.

Getting to the Marketing

Marketers need to keep several goals in mind when they try to drive opt-in behaviors in their webinar events. For one, they must establish expertise and become a trusted advisor. For another, they must build a brand personality through their events so they can forge personable connections as the program expands. Additionally, they must educate their audiences before asking for consent – teach them what you’re about, what’s going on in your industry, what they can do succeed, then invite them to learn more from you later. Each goal, however, can be summed up in one word: help. All you have to do to engage and gain compliance is help your audience.

Re-centering a marketing program’s mission to helping prospects and assisting longtime customers is now the critical marketing philosophy that must inform all other actions. In many ways, GDPR is a means of enabling you to better understand your prospect’s pain points and cater your marketing efforts to address those issues. By helping your audience, you help your organization.

Help yourself and your webinars

The fundamental shift from “pitching to” to “helping with” also affects how webinars are conducted. Gone are the days where registration is the only goal for the webinar. Now are the days of getting attendees to engage with you and a webinar’s content.

Programmatic webinars are often the best way to earn engagement. Much like a television station, a series, or program, can build on a company’s innate expertise and personalities. Talk shows, Q&A sessions, product demos, industry trends and far, far more are fair-game for webinar programs. Putting these programs into play facilitates trust between presenter and viewer and, over time, turns trust into engagement into consent. And in GDPR consent accounts for a lot.

There are two key terms marketers must understand to master GDPR’s nuances. One is called legitimate interest, where companies can collect and use personal data so long as it possesses a “legitimate interest” for the individual whose data is being collected (organizations must be able to justify their reasoning and should not assume legitimate interest gives them carte blanche to hoover up data).

The second term is far easier to understand: consent. As in, the attendee consents to hear more from you through a newsletter, emails and or webinars. For GDPR, consent is far more powerful, far more robust and far more engaging than legitimate interest ever can be. So, when in doubt, seek the consent of your attendees and prospects during webinar events.

Getting to Consent with Viewer

When it comes to webinars, especially those seeking long-term engagement, it pays to not pitch. Even if your company does produce a relevant solution to a problem at hand, pitching can still damage your brand and your events. After all, a webinar’s goal is to help the prospect with their problems — not hear you talk about your organization.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t position your organization within an event. For example, teams can place white papers, third-party studies, and benchmark reports in webinars where hosts and guests discuss customer satisfaction and practices, industry issues and in-depth solution guides — and safely point to them for download during an event (more on this in a second). You can also match your webinar programs to stages in the marketing funnel — from deep-dive product demos to high-level thought leadership panels on regulations and more.

With a program in place, presided by subject matter experts, percolated through planned events and series, resonate with audiences needing your help — then you can begin to work on consent through multiple opt-in opportunities.

Multiple opt-in opportunities are the nebulae — or electron cloud — surrounding a webinar. They’re the blog post you wrote ages ago, the third-party studies you commissioned, the white papers, the benchmark reports, the videos, demos, eBooks, slides you make available within a webinar; they are especially the gated on-demand webinars, videos and reports you link to — these are each an opportunity to ask an attendee or visitor for consent to contact them and build a relationship.

For example, you can ask attendees for consent with every gated asset with a simple box at the bottom of a form-fill (note: never pre-tick consent boxes — an illegal maneuver under GDPR). Contact us buttons, like those in webinars, can also be used as positive opt-in opportunities. Polls, too, can be used. In fact, during a July 12 webinar on GDPR, 85 percent of all attendees opted-in and consented to hear more from ON24 through a simple webinar poll after the host offered the poll to them. The point is to surround your attendees and prospects with the opportunity to engage with you and your brand on their terms.

Putting it all together

Marketers have marketed in a way that has left them unprepared for GDPR. A symptom may be automation — a set of tools and techniques used to make the elements of communication and marketing in a digital age much more comfortable  — but the real culprit is that marketers just don’t know how to engage with their audiences anymore.

With marketing automation, you could send out a dozen messages to millions of people. The benefit of this is that even if you convert two to three percent of your recipients, you still get an acceptable number of sign-ups. But it’s spray and pray marketing on an industry-wide scale. It atrophies the muscles you need to make a personal, human touch. But we have a fix. Use this checklist below to assess your GDPR readiness, and guide your engagement efforts.

Internal:

  • Review GDPR with legal
  • Establish roles and responsibilities for GDPR compliance
  • Audit database
  • Cleanse database of old, outdated, and duplicate entries
  • Review and update email preference center
  • Establish long-term policies for GDPR compliance

Preparing for GDPR-ready webinars:

  • Identify brand personalities, subject-matter experts for events
  • Plot webinar programs covering top, mid, and bottom-of-funnel needs, including:
  • Educational material
  • Industry news
  • Interactive product demos
  • Identify evergreen content to include in webinar events

Executing webinars:

  • Outline the event
  • Identify and incorporate resources relevant to the webinar
  • Identify and include opt-in opportunities
  • Outline event
  • Promote over email, social and more
  • Practice
  • Execute
  • Analyze results

For more information on how webinars can help you provide a GDPR-compliant event, check out our on-demand Webinar Best Practices Series event, “How webinars can Help You Succeed in a GDPR World .”

The post Gearing Your Marketing for a GDPR Future appeared first on ON24 .

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